Performances on the launchpad

    Most of my project is slated to be about the technical side of the soundboard, but while it's still a fresh new item for me, I wanted to play around with it a little.  I gained some minor insights from these experiences.  First of all, there's a keyboard preset that tries to map the buttons of the launchpad like a real keyboard.

    This layout is the best possible arrangement for traditional uses for midi devices.  I used it to read music and play like I would on a piano.  It's definitely far more awkward than a traditional midi device for that use case because of the jumps between octaves.  It also has redundant keys for 3 of the Cs, and wastes 12 more buttons to try to evoke the shape of white and black keys.

    The other 2 layouts arrange the midi notes in 4 groups of 4.  It's a more efficient use of all 64 buttons on the launchpad, but vertically splits the launchpad in 2, making the experience of playing songs significantly different from any other keyboard I've ever played on.  This layout does give some interesting opportunities though. Going straight up is going up a major third, and going up and to the right is a minor third.  These 2 dimensional relationships between key positions could be leveraged to make particular chords easier to play and completely change the environment of freestyling.

    Currently what I'm most inspired to make is a harp like system, with 5-8 rows of 7 notes which can be modified to be sharp or flat with "pedal" keys.  This is probably the first thing I'll do once I get my interface up and running.  By the end of project, I hope to have a nice set of subroutines, even if there is only one "main" one.